The Importance of Knowing What's Important

Being a counterculture for the common good begins with what we choose to focus on--and to overlook.

Andy Crouch| December 14, 2006

2006This article is part of CT's digital archives. Subscribers have access to all current and past issues, dating back to 1956.

The first year of the Christian Vision Project concludes with this essay by project editor Andy Crouch. In answering the series' initial question"How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?"Crouch has invited response from a variety of perspectives: a Reformed professor in Southern California, an Anglican bishop in Uganda, an ethicist and evangelical feminist at Duke Divinity School, a multiethnic ministry coach in the leafy Chicago suburb of Oak Park, and others. Such diversity fits Crouch wellhow many writers and editors can cover topics of science, popular culture, and the virtue of shaving with a double-edged razor (see "The Best a Man Can Get," Books & Culture, March/April 2006) with equal verve?

But Crouch is not one to rock the boat merely for effect. Rather, his aim, and the aim of the entire cvp projectaudacious as it may beis to redirect the good ship evangelicalism, pointing us toward what Billy Graham has called "a vision of the future [that's] greater than the vision of the past."

In this piece, he writes, the question of evangelical cultural engagement begins not with a how, but a who. We need a hero, and Crouch has a nominee in mind.

The Christian Vision Project begins each year with a big question. In 2006, we asked, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?

We knew from the start that any set of articles, no matter how compelling, would provide an inadequate answer. Every how eventually has to be lived out by a who. Making sense of our moment in history, in other words, requires us to make a wise choice of heroes. Fortunately, over the course of 2006, we found one.

I'm not thinking primarily of the Christian leaders who contributed ...

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